I am exporting my files to be printed by an outside service and I know before hand when working in the develop module what size I want the print to be. So I set the crop aspect ratio to be what I want, say 5x7 or 8x10. In one batch of photos to export I might have several different aspect ratios for different prints. When I upload them to the printing service I have to manually guess at which one was which size for printing.

I see I can include "Cropped" which appears to be the pixel size dimensions which is slightly helpful, but I would rather not have to do math to figure out what the print size should be. Ideally the filename would include the same text displayed in the develop module crop aspect ratio list such as "5 x 7" or "4 x 5 / 8 x 10" that way I can tie it to the print size easily.

2 Answers
2

I don't think there is a field in the metadata which explicity defines the crop aspect ratio, but there are plenty of other fields which you could use instead; e.g. 'Instructions' where you could manually add the aspect ratio. You can use 'Sync (metadata)' to apply a crop ratio to the relevant images to avoid typing it in more than once.

Then just add 'Instructions' to the custom file name in your export preset.

Thanks, I actually ended up modifying the "Copy Name" and including this information in there since I was using Soft Proof copies that also included the paper color profile information as well.
–
Joe SolanoJun 28 '12 at 15:45

I'm starting to do something similar using keywords instead of repurposing an IPTC. Create a set of keywords for the formats ("crop_16_10", for instance), and then you can work off of that. Lightroom doesn't give ytou the ability to work with this data (or search on it. sigh). In general, I've found I'd rather create custom sets of keywords than "hack" the IPTC for this kind of operation. Just remember to set those keywords to not export when you export an image.